﻿Dreams are a complex interaction between our bodies, minds, memories, and experiences. “Dreaming Machine” is a trajectory of site-specific artistic works exploring the topic of dreaming. “Dreaming Machine #1” (prototype) is the first in the series. During the day, the work examines its visual context. Stimulus from the visual context inspires day dreams through its experience. At night the work freely associates elements of its experience and presents them to the audience. (more…)

Here is the memory field of the installation (as of this morning) after running for two days.

The context appears extreme in terms of the SOM’s ability to organize it. This context could use more units in the SOM. Talking to Wendy Mansilla I had the idea that it would be nice to generate these montage images in an exhibition so that they can be seen by the audience. The idea is to generate them at full resolution and have them printed and hung in the gallery around the installation over time as the exhibition continues.

This is the path of the longest dream path so far in the piksel exhibition. It contains 45 memories. It is not the longest dream (which is a loop of 8 highly similar memories) but activates the most unique memories since starting the installation. It will be interesting to see how this will change as the installation continues.

Another idea I had, when talking to Alex Norman, was a way of making the camera move without random operations. The idea is that the camera will break the image up into 5 regions. The lower, upper, left and right edges; and the centre (where the centre will be larger). For each of these regions a histogram will be taken. The histograms will then be compared using the usual method. The edge histogram that has the largest difference, in comparison to the centre area, will select the direction. Just as the dreams now follow the structure of the memories, the camera will follow the structure of the visual context.

Here are some shots of the progress of installing “Dreaming Machine #1 (prototype)”. The installation went well. The folks at Lydgalleriet were great and this will be the first time I’ll get to see the system projected! Tomorrow will be just for fine-tuning and the opening will be at 7pm.